Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the educational philosophical dispositions of preservice teachers and teacher educators. Voluntary participants were 206 preservice teachers and 32 teacher educators from a faculty of education at a public university in central Turkey. The mean age was 20.2 ± 1.6 for pre-service teachers and it was 33.7 ± 5.9 for teacher educators. Data were gathered during the fall semester of 2014–2015. After permissions were attained from the university institutional review board, each participants completed “The Educational Belief Scale”. The scale consists of 40 items with the following five dimensions: Perennialism, Essentialism, Progressivism, Existentionalism, Reconstructionalism. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients ranged between. 68 and .90 for each subscale in this study. Descriptive statistics and Mann–Whitney U test were used for data analysis. The results showed that the most internalized educational philosophical dispositions were progressivism and existentialism, while the least one was essentialism for both groups. When comparing the mean scores of philosophical dispositions it was found that teacher educators received higher scores on progressivism and existentialism, while preservice teachers scored higher on essentialism (p<.05). As regarding gender, males were significantly more essentialist in both group, while females were more progressivist for preservice teachers (p<.05). Key words: Educational philosophy, teacher education, philosophical disposition.
Highlights
The quality of the education depends directly upon the quality of the educators
The results showed that the most internalized educational philosophical dispositions were progressivism and existentialism, while the least one was essentialism for both groups
The results showed that the most internalized philosophical dispositions of preservice teachers were progressivism (M=4.11, SD=.76), existentialism, reconstructionalism, perennialism, and essentialism (M=3.06, SD=.61), respectively
Summary
The quality of the education depends directly upon the quality of the educators It is no longer acceptable for educators to possess only skills and knowledge necessary to teach. It is a fact today that the goal of teacher education programs is to train future educators in such a way to produce highly qualified individuals so that they have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to become effective teachers to fostering growth and learning for their students (Dottin, 2009; Notar et al, 2009). They impact an educator’s own professional growth (NCATE, 2006). Because of that, determining teachers’ and prospective teachers’ educational dispositions is quite necessary and important for understanding their behaviors (Enochs and Riggs, 1990)
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